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18 Reviews:

A fantastic non-linear adventure game that actually looks and plays like a true fangame. The production value is top tier, and you can see the references and influences of various other games sprinkled all over the game and its bosses. As the name implies, expect trolls and traps, but not an overbearing amount of them, and presented in a creative enough way to always feel interesting and funny at times.

The game features a bunch of island stages that can be tackled in any order, and each contains an optional path that gives a reward that pays off in the final stage. Each island has it's own mini fast-travel system to make backtracking effortless. The various rooms keep offering fresh ideas and gimmicks so that platforming never feels dull, and the bosses are pretty fair, many of which offer tells on attacks with instagib potential. The final boss is a bit tougher than the others, as it should be, but still remains a fairly balanced fight especially if you have the reward for clearing the extra paths.

This game reminds us of what fangames could and should look like and gives a compelling reason to want to play fangames in a meta of soulless needle games.

Definitely a good game. Insane production values on bosses and there's constant variety to the platforming which makes it impossible to get bored. The fact some gimmicks are introduced for just one or two saves is a real testament to the sheer variety on display in this game. The good far outweighs the bad, but I think the bad is worth noting.

-Some screens are so heavily cycle based that you just repeat the save mindlessly until you memorize the exact order of moves to make to eave through a bullet hell, which isn't very engaging. The save where bullets go up and then sway horizontally as they come down is an example of this.
-Each boss has a strict pattern it follows, doing each move in a particular order that never changes. I find this to be very boring in pretty much any game. You'll play through the first move of each boss way way more than the last move, which I think is a downgrade from Overlord, where at the very least you'd experience each move a roughly equivalent amount of times for most bosses.
-The RNG of the moves themselves in some bosses could be handled better. One boss shoots a wave up or down randomly, and one time he shot an up shot 10 times in a row, meaning I was just sitting there. It looks pretty unprofessional and feels bad to play (especially if it's down 10 times in a row, which also happened to me).
-The final boss can only be hurt in its first phase by jumping. While fighting him, I ended up jumping constantly for almost twenty minutes straight to keep hurting him, which soon started hurting my thumb instead. The boss would only be improved by making the crystals damageable from the ground, because as it stands, the main thing that's hard about him is beating him before your thumb hurts too much to fight him.

Anyway, Troll King is a good game and fun throughout, with some hiccups here and there. It gets a strong recommendation from me, as long as you don't mind some mediocre boss design and potentially dropping it on the final boss due to thumb pain.